Darwin the Geologist

To decide on the best designers to undertake the new Darwin exhibition the Sedgwick Museum held a design competition. Last week, after an extensive process and careful deliberation, the winners, Haley Sharpe Design of Leicester, were appointed.

The process began back in November when ten design companies were asked to submit portfolios. Four of these companies were then short listed for interview in February and they were given a design brief to help them to prepare a presentation on their initial ideas for the exhibition.

Dr Francis Neary, Darwin the Geologist Project Manager said ‘the presentations were of a very high standard, many innovative ideas were proposed and they proved an excellent way to assess the merits of each company. It was a very close call between two of the design practices and we had to ask them a series of further questions after the interviews to make what turned out to be a very difficult decision.’

The Sedgwick team look forward to working with Hayley Sharpe to produce an exciting and engaging exhibition.

Today staff at the Sedgwick Museum have finished moving the giant deer skeleton. The ten thousand year-old skeleton whose deconstruction we reported in this post has now been fully restored on top of its brand new base. Scroll down for the first pictures of the Irish Elk in its new location.

Visitors will have to wait untill 2009 when the gallery reopens to see it with your own eyes but staff at the Department of Earth Sciences have been enjoying the new view. They believe it will be well worth the wait.

Before staff at the Sedgwick Museum could begin work on the Darwin displays, a lot of work had to be done in preparation. This story starts at the very beginning of the Darwin project, with some of the problems the museum had to consider before even applying for exhibition funding. Like, how do you make space for a major exhibition in a small museum?

Space is at a premium in our museum and the installation of the new exhibition will require the removal of 500-600 specimens from display. Most of these specimens will be returned to Museum stores, housed in a seperate building in West Cambridge. However a recent assessment of the existing storage space showed that there would not be enough room to accommodate all this material. This report by Dan Pemberton, our collections manager, explains how Museum staff solved this 40 ton problem:

When the Museum applied to the Heritage Lottery Fund for funding for the Darwin exhibition we included a bid to replace the existing single level mobile storage system in one of the Museum stores with a higher capacity two level system. As soon as the go ahead was given, planning for the replacement racking began.

The store contained approximately 40 metric tonnes of geological specimens. The first problem that faced us was how to install a whole new storage system with no free space to empty the contents of the store into. We went to our suppliers for help and they assured us that it would be possible to install the racking in phases; this would allow us to leave the bulk of the stored collections in place while two racks were temporarily removed to make space for contractors to work in.

We the found temporary storage for the contents of the racks elsewhere in the building and ordered special pallets to fit the building’s less-than-spacious lift so that entire cabinets of specimens could be moved upstairs. Several months of preparatory work were carried out by volunteers who stabilised collections in cabinets so that specimens were not damaged or separated from their labels. Unfortunately we had to close the stores to visitors once the move started.

Many large and heavy objects had been stored on top of the existing mobile racking, these specimens were removed and put into temporary storage.

To ensure that the new racking and existing cabinets would fit in the store we used the not-very-high-tech method of drawing racking and cabinets to scale on graph paper. Cut-outs of cabinets were made so that they could be moved around to make sure that once installed the new racking and the cabinets it was to house would not foul any of the existing utilities. This showed us that the existing lighting and its service conduit in the store was too low and would have to be raised before installation could start. Whilst the ceiling lighting was being replaced we took the opportunity to install some additional wall lighting to the gangway to improve light levels for working in the store.

Installation of the new mobile pallet racking was planned to take place in 10 weekly phases. Each phase took one week to complete, the contractor installed a segment of new track on the Monday and the new mobile rack on the Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday the Sedgwick’s Conservator, Sarah Fineney and I transferred 12 cabinets (each containing 4 metric tonnes of collections) from the old racking to the new. This left Friday for any delays. The following Monday the old rack was removed by the contractors and the whole process began again.

Some of the phases were more complicated since some extremely large display cases had been temporarily stored on top of the existing racking to make a makeshift second level. These were too large to be removed from the store but still had to be transferred from the old racking to the new. Our solution was to hire a manual handling contractor to come in and move these cabinets for us at the right time in each phase, so that they ended up on the correct section of new racking. Trying to timetable the installation of lighting, phasing of racking installation and the movement of cabinets at the right time was a bit like trying to solve a giant Chinese puzzle!

The new racking is now installed and the stores have reopened to visitors. Now we are tranferring objects and cabinets from their temporary locations to the new racking and the first batch of objects from the old displays in the Museum will follow shortly.